Free Caesar by Colleen McCullough Page B

finish. Mater, to live on without Julia? Not possible. Oh, why do women have to suffer such unbearable pain? They do not run the world, they are not to blame. Therefore why should they suffer?Their lives are so enclosed, so centered upon the hearth. Their children, their home and their men, in that order. Such is their nature. And nothing is crueler for them than to outlive their children. That part of my life is closed forever. I will not open that door again. I have no one left who loves me as a woman loves her son or her father, and my poor little wife is a stranger who loves her cats more than she does me. For why should she not? They have kept her company, they have given her some semblance of love. Whereas I am never there. I know nothing about love, except that it has to be earned. And though I am completely empty, I can feel the strength in me grow. This will not defeat me. It has freed me. Whatever I have to do, I will do. There is no one left to tell me I cannot. He gathered up three scrolls: Servilia's, Calpurnia's, Aurelia's. The detritus of so many men pulling up their roots and moving on meant many fires, for which Caesar was glad. The last live coal he had needed had been found by chance; fires were rare in hot weather. There was always the eternal flame, but it belonged to Vesta and to take flame from it to use for ordinary purposes required ritual and prayers. Caesar was the Pontifex Maximus; he would not profane that mystery. But, as with Pompey's letter, he had fire to hand. He fed Servilia to it, and watched her burn sardonically. Then Calpurnia, his face impassive. The last to go was Aurelia, unopened, but he didn't hesitate. Whatever she had said, whenever she had written it, no longer mattered. Surrounded by flakes dancing in the air, Caesar pulled the folds of his purple-bordered toga over his head and said the words of purification.

Ceasar, Let the Dice Fly
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    It was eighty miles of easy marching from Portus Itius to Samarobriva: the first day on a rutted track through mighty forests of oak, the second day amid vast clearings wherein the soil had been turned for cropping or rich grasses fed naked Gallic sheep and hairy Gallic cattle. Trebonius had gone with the Twelfth much earlier than Caesar, who was the last to go. Left behind with the Seventh, Fabius had already stripped the defenses of a camp big enough to contain eight legions and re-erected them around a camp which could be comfortably held by one legion. Satisfied that this outpost was in good condition to resist attack, Caesar took the Tenth and headed for Samarobriva. The Tenth was his favorite legion, the one he liked to work with personally, and though its number was not the lowest, it was the original legion of Further Gaul. When he had raced headlong from Rome in that March of nearly five years ago—covering the seven hundred miles in eight days and fighting his way along a goat-track pass through the high Alps—it was the Tenth he had found with Pomptinus at Genava. By the time the Fifth Alauda and the Seventh had arrived, going the long way under Labienus, Caesar and the Tenth had got to know each other. Typically, not through battle. The army's most quoted joke about Caesar was that for every action you fought, Caesar would have made you shovel ten thousand wagon-loads of earth and rock. As had been the case at Genava, where the Tenth (later joined by the Fifth Alauda and the Seventh) had dug a sixteen-foot-high wall nineteen miles long to keep the emigrating Helvetii out of the Province. Battles, said the army, were Caesar's rewards for all that shoveling, building, logging and slogging. Of which none had done more than the Tenth, nor fought more bravely and intelligently in those fairly infrequent battles. Caesar never fought unless he had to. There was even evidence of the army's work as the long and disciplined column of the Tenth swung their feet in unison and sang their marching songs through the lands of the Morini around